Craft Your Life and Make It Good

April 21, 2015

Ugly Beginnings

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

~GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I thought I'd be able to carry off this Love Your Blog Challenge. After all, it only asked for four posts over as many weeks, and who couldn't manage that?

Me, apparently.

Last week's prompt was Beginnings. "Well, I've had lots of those," I thought, "so no problem there." Marriage. Babies. Moving house. Moving again. Moving several more times. A blog. Then this blog. Then one more blog. Renovations. Recipes. School years. Art projects. Crochet projects. Knitting projects. You know, life.

Er, right. But no. No words.

"Ok," I thought. "Obviously the ole noggin doesn't want to look back at past beginnings, so maybe I should start something new." I didn't have to look far. I started a book. I finished it. Whee.

Plenty of new things were going on in life. Meetings, auditions, a performance, a First Communion. I was not inspired to add to that wonderful-yet-slightly-stressful chaos with another project. So I opted for one more week of fallow-field blogging, and I let the Beginnings prompt pass to concentrate on the actual beginning happening around me.

This week's prompt was Ugly. "Plenty of that in the world," I thought. "But do I want to write about it?"

Not really. Well, maybe. If I can keep it light.

And that's when I remembered about Roald Dahl's The Twits. I love the story of the Twits. Whenever I see it on the shelf in a used book store, I buy it so I always have an extra copy to give away to the right person. It's a funny, horrendous tale with a satisfying ending. Here is what Dahl has to say about Mrs Twit and ugly:

But the funny thing is that Mrs Twit wasn't born ugly. She'd had quite a nice face when she was young. The ugliness had grown upon her year by year as she got older.

Why would that happen? I'll tell you why.

If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

I think that's all that's needed about ugly here for now. Go show your sunbeams.